


Renaissance

by Sornettes (CatchingTomorrow)



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-05
Updated: 2013-06-05
Packaged: 2017-12-14 01:35:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/831193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CatchingTomorrow/pseuds/Sornettes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grantaire remembers.<br/>He thinks he knew it from the beginning. Somewhere right at the back of his mind, hidden amongst the cobwebbed childhood memories and the demons lurking where the light will never reach. It's usually in his best interests to leave the thoughts that make their homes down there alone, skirting deftly around them whenever his neural pathways veer too close and washing them back with tides of alcohol whenever they start to crawl out into places he can't ignore. It's for this reason, he thinks, that it didn't come back to him earlier. Not until he took the scenic route home one evening when the moon shone in the sky and the sun shone on the horizon and he was just the right side of tipsy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Renaissance

**Author's Note:**

> I'm so sorry.

“ _What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.'”_

\- Friedrich Nietszche

* * *

 

Grantaire remembers.

He thinks he knew it from the beginning. Somewhere right at the back of his mind, hidden amongst the cobwebbed childhood memories and the demons lurking where the light will never reach. It's usually in his best interests to leave the thoughts that make their homes down there alone, skirting deftly around them whenever his neural pathways veer too close and washing them back with tides of alcohol whenever they start to crawl out into places he can't ignore. It's for this reason, he thinks, that it didn't come back to him earlier. Not until he took the scenic route home one evening when the moon shone in the sky and the sun shone on the horizon and he was just the right side of tipsy.

The café hit him like a punch of air to the gut. Musain, said the sign. Musain, where the bartender knew his face and smiled as he came through the door. Musain, where the tables were packed and lively, or was that only their tables? Musain, where the oil lamps were always lit and the-

Oil lamps? It was 2013. Why was he thinking about oil lamps? And who were 'they'?

It's not like he had anywhere else to be. The man who was not called Grantaire pushed open the door and stepped inside.

That was when he remembered.

The Café Musain is just one of those forever-truths, he supposes. A peg holding down the tent fabric of reality. An axis on which the world turns. Every night it's there, every night for two hundred years, and for the first time since 1832 Grantaire was home. Everything was exactly how it had been and so beautifully familiar he wanted to fall to his knees and cry. Feuilly and Bahorel (only those aren't their names now; no-one here calls themselves how they used to) were sitting at the bar and arguing about Poland (or is it somewhere else now?). Bahorel's knuckles were skinned, the speckled scabs turning pale as he wraps his fingers around a glass, and Feuilly's clothes were thrift shop threadbare. Joly was talking to Bossuet about some new version of swine flu or polio or whatever it was that week, the difference between them being that no amount of obsession on Joly's part could make him truly catch it and no amount on Bossuet's part could keep him from doing just that. There was Jehan, hair braided just as it always had been, scribbling notes in a book bound in flower-patterned cotton and pausing every now and then to ask for a word that rhymed with 'cascade' or 'tempest'. Courfeyrac was at the bar buying drinks for pretty girls and handsome boys and listening to their life stories with a smile to rival Gatsby's. There was Combeferre, sometimes talking, sometimes listening intently, quieter than the motley array of audacious characters that call themselves Les Amis de l'ABC but no less present. And then there was Enjolras.

And then there was Enjolras.

He doesn't look a day over seventeen, though the man who now calls himself Grantaire would bet what little money he has left on him being twenty-three this October. He was radiant, filling the entire room with his light like a sun god. An Apollo. The most beautiful thing he had ever set eyes on.

He remembered 1832. He remembered General Lamarque, he remembered the barricades, he remembered the gunshots and the shouting and waking up lost and disoriented in the wineshop and _do you permit it?_

He remembered everything.

And he'd said, "Enjolras."

No-one answered. His Orestes didn't even look up.

"Bahorel!" The brawler was the closest; Grantaire tugged desperately on his sleeve until Bahorel looked up and fixed him with a vague expression. "I found you," he almost sobbed. "I can't believe... I've always been looking. I didn't know I was, but I always... I knew..."

"You've got me confused with someone else, mate," said Bahorel. "My name's Henri. I don't know a Bahorel."

Grantaire stared. "But... don't you recognise me?"

Bahorel (Henri doesn't suit him) shook his head. "Sorry. Have we met somewhere before?"

 _Yes_. "Never mind. I need to speak to Enjol- I mean, what's that guy's name?" He pointed to Enjolras with a violently shaking finger.

"That's Alexandre. Why, do you want to join Les Amis de l'ABC?"

"I thought I already had." He made his way to the other end of the room, his heart beating in time with his footsteps.

Enjolras (Apollo, Orestes, Castor, never Alexandre) blinked at him as he approached. "Can I help you?"

Yes, and no, and everything in between, and _he has to remember, he_ has _to, Grantaire cannot be the only one._ "Do you recognise me?"

"No, what's your name?"

"Grantaire."

"Sorry. I don't believe we've met."

 _The barricade!_ he wanted to scream. _General Lamarque! The revolution! Me!_ But there was no recognition on Enjolras's face. No hint of a dawning revelation. Nothing but polite confusion. "I... we..."

"Are you interested in learning about the cause? We've just finished our meeting for today but if you come back at five o'clock next week-"

"I already know about the cause!" he burst out. He felt lightheaded, like he was going to be sick. "I already know you! Do none of you remember at all?"

"We go to a lot of political demonstrations," said Combeferre gently. "Maybe that's where he's seen us before."

"A political demonstration." He was going to faint. "Yeah. Something like that."

Enjolras's face lit up, and it was blinding. "Then you should definitely come to... are you drunk?"

Grantaire was vaguely aware that he was swaying, gripping the table for support as the world faded and swam before his eyes. There was a buzzing in his ears that had nothing to do with the ambient chatter, the lights were brighter, the colours were so saturated they hurt his eyes. "Probably," he manages.

That smile was gone. The absence of it ached. "Next time, don't be."

"Why not?" he grinned, because he's R, he's _Grantaire_ , and the sudden dizzying headrush of his identity made the demons in his mind throw their ugly heads back in manic, wide-eyed laughter. "Don't you approve of my vices, great Apollo? You'll find they're more tangible than your own if you ever came down from your pedestal long enough to try. _Liberté, egalité_ and _fraternité_ are synthetic constructs worshipped by malcontents who believe they deserve something more from life than what they have. The closer you get to catching them the further they dance out of your reach. Patria is such a cold mistress. But my mistress?" He grabbed a bottle from the table between them and bit the cap off with practised ease. Maybe it was Combeferre's. It certainly wasn't Enjolras's. He didn't care. "My mistress can keep me warm at night. If you'll have me choose between my vices and the cause, I'll choose the one I can believe in."

Enjolras's lips tightened like a drawstring. He stood up, rising to eye level, and _oh_ he was angry, Grantaire was frightened and ashamed and so utterly thrilled. "Don't come to the meeting, then. I don't want you there. If you can't believe in the cause then why did you even come here tonight?"

Grantaire downed the liquid in the bottle and set it back down on the table with a flourish. "Because I can believe in you," he said. It made no sense, it made _perfect sense_ , and he was gone from the café before anyone could tell the difference.

He came back for the next meeting. And the next one. And the one after that. He always comes, and soon he's a fixture of the Café Musain just like the rest of them, a tent peg, an axis. He's the cynic in the corner who plays devil's advocate, his own advocate, with no goal but to pick apart the arguments of everyone else with drunken precision until Enjolras's face takes on that red tint just like he remembers and he knows that underneath his cool exterior he's coming apart at the seams. He gives up hope on being remembered himself. There is a tiny flash of desperate possibility when Courfeyrac introduces them to his new roommate, a boy named Marius with his head so lost in the clouds Grantaire is amazed he can tie his shoes in the morning. Just like last time (only now Marius is a conservative, and he knows just how long that's going to last). But Marius remembers nothing.

And so he sits, and drinks, and argues, and it's okay because he never had any hope in the first place, if he's honest. He's _Grantaire_. An unaccepted Pylades. If Paris wasn't the last time then maybe this won't be either (maybe Paris wasn't even the first; sometimes he thinks he hears his demons muttering in ancient tongues and battles and the clash of metal on metal) and what made him think he would be built of stronger stuff the second time around? This is who he is. The cynical drunk who disrupts meetings and mocks the cause. And Enjolras still doesn't understand why he bothers to come at all.

He will. He always does, in the end.


End file.
